Shrinking middle class prop

Two non-pathetic economists, Don Boudreaux and Mark Perry (one has bought me beer), write in the Wall Street Journal today that the shrinking middle class is a nothing more than a political prop.

You should read their criticisms of cost and wage measurements. But, here are a few points that are more compelling to the average joe. First, the basics have never cost us less:

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, spending by households on many of modern life’s “basics”—food at home, automobiles, clothing and footwear, household furnishings and equipment, and housing and utilities—fell from 53% of disposable income in 1950 to 44% in 1970 to 32% today.

Second, gadgets of prosperity are available to all:

Today, the quantities and qualities of what ordinary Americans consume are closer to that of rich Americans than they were in decades past. Consider the electronic products that every middle-class teenager can now afford—iPhones, iPads, iPods and laptop computers. They aren’t much inferior to the electronic gadgets now used by the top 1% of American income earners, and often they are exactly the same.

Finally, a true measure. Would you trade what you earn and have today with someone from the 1950s or 70s?

Even though the inflation-adjusted hourly wage hasn’t changed much in 50 years, it is unlikely that an average American would trade his wages and benefits in 2013—along with access to the most affordable food, appliances, clothing and cars in history, plus today’s cornucopia of modern electronic goods—for the same real wages but with much lower fringe benefits in the 1950s or 1970s, along with those era’s higher prices, more limited selection, and inferior products.

I can’t believe anyone buys the shrinking middle class barb. For those of us that have been around for more than a couple of decades, we don’t need economists to point out that the suburban blossom of mcmansions and the roads becoming clogged 4×4 family passenger trucks occurred during this period where the middle class supposedly shrunk.

Advertisement